


First Impressions

by rikyl



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Episode: Freddy Spaghetti, F/M, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-31
Updated: 2011-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-18 04:38:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10609425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rikyl/pseuds/rikyl
Summary: Written for a Government Shutdown prompt in which someone requested a love-at-first-sight fic.Originally posted to LJ.





	

The first thought that Ben Wyatt had about Leslie Knope was that he was going to have to fire her. It was three days before they’d even met.

He was going through the Pawnee personnel files to make some preliminary notes on how to cut 40 percent of the budget. Ron Swanson, Leslie Knope, and Jerry Gergich carried the three highest salaries in the parks department. Gergich seemed like an obvious cut—his job description and performance reviews indicated that he contributed relatively little. Ben figured he was one of those guys who was in government for the stability and benefits, just riding it out until retirement.

This Knope woman was another matter. While Gergich did too little, Knope did way too much—from big ventures like Camp Athena to a truly absurd number of smaller projects. Looking at the list—which was really quite impressive, if he wasn’t focusing on the numbers just then—he felt the corner of his mouth twitch upward in appreciation. But it wasn’t surprising that Pawnee was having budget problems, if this is what they allowed one woman to do in one department.

They’d have to cut Leslie. They’d have to cut Ms. Knope, he instantly corrected himself, because his job was always easier when he kept things impersonal, and this already didn't feel quite impersonal. He rationalized that she was probably one of those ambitious egomaniacs who did things for the attention or for the resume lines. And if not … well, there just wasn’t room for someone with so much unbridled enthusiasm in small city government, at least not in a city with the financial record of Pawnee.

He knew that from personal experience.

\--

The first time Ben Wyatt caught himself caring what Leslie Knope thought about him was approximately three and a half minutes after meeting her, and that was probably a generous estimate.

Parks was the fourth department he’d met with that day, and she was the sixth person to yell at him, and the third person to call him names (the first two had been more vulgar). It was all just the usual—bitter, defensive people, worried about getting their due, angry at an outsider questioning their decisions. He didn’t mind if they chose to blame him—it was Chris’s job to smooth things over.

Until he got to Parks and Recreation. Leslie Knope was the first person in Pawnee—and probably a much larger geographical area, if he was being honest—to make him wish he was the one playing the role of good cop for once.

It was something about the way she seemed ready to go to the mat for her coworker. Instead of making him think he had been wrong about Gergich, it made him think he’d been wrong about Leslie—and yeah, okay, in his head, they were now on a first-name basis. And he wasn’t going to overanalyze why or anything.

And when she embarked on a passionate defense of her adorably misplaced modifier—because yes, this particular building did have feelings—he got that she wasn’t just someone who did things. She was someone who cared about doing things, and there was a difference, and it was a difference he could respect.

That she seemed to be lumping him in with this Swanson guy who treated budget cuts like entertainment, to be enjoyed while chuckling and eating pork cracklins—that stung, because it couldn’t be further from the truth. He did what was necessary and tried to communicate that honestly, but he hardly enjoyed tearing things down. He was just treading water, trying to do his job well, hoping that someday he’d get another chance to do the opposite.

And okay, fine. In retrospect, maybe he shouldn’t have used the words “gut” or “machete”—he valued directness, but he could have chosen his words more carefully. Because in spite of his current line of work—and the role he’d taken on in this partnership with Chris—deep down, Ben Wyatt considered himself to be a person who cared. And suddenly he cared very much what this woman whom he’d just met thought of him.

Just how much it mattered to him was a little alarming.

So he got the hell out of the parks department. Getting her out of his mind was a different matter.

\--

The first time Ben thought about kissing Leslie was when she held out her hand to him at the bar—presumably for a handshake, but in this bizarre prim way with the back of her hand turned upward that made him think that maybe she wanted him to kiss it?

He didn’t, of course—that would have been really weird. But the impulse was there, and it threw him just the same.

After she finished yelling at him, a blur of red shirt and pink lips and fiery words, he retreated to his motel room. Stripping off the different shirt and jeans he’d changed into before going out, he berated himself for bothering. It was like he’d been trying to show her he was somebody else, that he wasn’t really just this dark-suited, dark-hearted state auditor who'd repulsed her. That he'd dressed the part and hunted her down to show her--it all seemed absurd and mortifying at this point.

Collapsing on the bed, he squeezed his eyes shut and pondered why a few drunken words from this woman could have a greater effect on him than any death threat he'd ever received. He reminded himself that she was drunk and upset, and she didn’t really think he wanted to kill people with machetes—although the idea that anyone associated his meek scrawny self with any sort of violence amused him a tiny bit. A few days ago, he’d scooped up a spider from his motel room—a different motel room, although it had looked the same—and set it free carefully outside. So, um.

But there was this definite line Leslie was drawing, between people she stood by, and people she defended against. And he had this strange sensation in the pit of his stomach that could best be described as a longing … to be on the other side of that line. He wanted to be on her side.

And, also, now that it had been suggested, however inadvertently, he now couldn’t shake the idea of kissing her, on any part of her body she offered. He chalked it up to the color of the shirt she had been wearing—he had recently seen an article about an actual scientific study that determined red could have that effect on people—and the fact that it had been so many months since he’d been with a woman. Seriously, an embarrassing number of months.

It certainly didn’t have anything to do with the fact that she radiated so much passion, or that he wanted a little piece of that passion for himself.

If it wasn’t exactly implausible, it could certainly prove problematic.

\--

The first time Ben asked Leslie out, it was entirely by accident.

His dreams the previous night had been a heady swirl of yellow hair and government projects, past and future blurred together, and he woke up feeling foolish and hungover, despite the fact he hadn’t had more than a beer at the Snakehole Lounge.

Gulping his morning coffee, he tried to get a grip. It wasn’t healthy to get this personally involved. He was there to do a job, and he had to remain objective, and seriously, it was crazy to be this worked up over a woman he’d known less than twenty-four hours. When he re-entered Pawnee City Hall, he was newly committed to keeping her at arm’s length.

That lasted all of twenty seconds into Leslie’s unexpected apology, which quickly escalated into her yelling at him again, which reawakened all over again this urge he had to explain himself to her. It was ridiculous. But he couldn’t help himself.

And that’s how he found himself at a bar at 10:30 in the morning, usurping Chris’s good-cop role, trying to get on her good side. Or any side, as long as it was hers. Or at least get her to see his side. Or possibly see that there weren’t any sides? He wasn’t sure.

He hadn’t been Benji Wyatt for seventeen years, and he’d spent most of those years running away, self-flagellating, making amends. But for some reason, with Leslie, he wanted to bring the boy mayor out of hiding. It wasn’t just a cautionary tale about responsibility and restraint. It was his way of saying, Look at me, I’m like you, I’m a tiny bird too! Whatever the fuck that meant.

It was presumptuous to think she’d remember him, or that she’d appreciate him for having been that kid. And it was presumptuous to assume he could know anything about who she was or what she wanted—after just a day, after just a few quick and heated conversations.

He knew all that. But he also felt like he knew her, intuitively somehow, and it didn’t surprise him in the least when all his assumptions turned out to be true.

The building totally had feelings, and—he wouldn’t have been able to explain it to someone else if he tried—but he felt like he knew what that meant.

He was still going to have to cut her job. But if all his assumptions about her were correct, he knew she was going to be okay. Phenomenal even, to borrow a word from the rightful good cop.

\--

The first grand romantic gesture of Ben’s life came just hours after that intended firing.

He arrived at Lot 48 disappointed that she’d gone through with putting on the concert—he’d known she was passionate, but he hadn’t expected her to be reckless. Benji had been a dumb teenager when he’d bankrupted a town, but Leslie was an accomplished professional who should know better than to pull a stunt like this.

Then he’d ended up disappointed in himself—for thinking the worst, for not realizing that Leslie Knope would find a way to stay within the limits while pushing beyond them too. She wasn’t reckless. She was a force to be reckoned with.

And then he’d been disappointed—no, scratch that, angry—at this feckless children’s singer who was letting her down. For that matter, he was angry at every gutless person in the world who had ever done anything half-assed or for the wrong reasons. Angry on her behalf. And he felt like making it up to her.

And that’s how Ben Wyatt ended up buying her a children’s concert instead of firing her. Because, yeah, no, it wasn’t for the kids. Sort of, it was, but he assumed there were kids in Eagleton too.

It was really for that stunning woman onstage, the one who was going to pull this off no matter what, singlehandedly, even if she had to do the singing herself.

When Freddy Spaghetti approached the mic, Ben stood off to the side of the stage with his arms crossed across his chest self-consciously, feeling giddy and awkward and weird and obvious. He felt like he might as well be John Cusack holding up a stereo blasting “In Your Eyes,” for as obvious as he was being.

When she caught his eye, he twitched a few fingers without unfolding his arms, as if that amounted to a wave. He’d done this grand thing for her, but now that she was looking straight at him, knowing what he had done, suddenly an actual wave, with one hand lifted into the air and everything, felt like giving away too much.

Then she was standing next to him, and it was worth it just to feel like they were on the same side, even for these few moments. And she smiled at him. And her smile made him want to go out on a limb, to turn himself inside out, to be a better person. To be himself, the real Ben, the one he usually kept so tightly under wraps.

It was true, Mean Ben had a soft spot—one with gleaming blonde hair and infectious enthusiasm and disarming sincerity. She made him feel vulnerable and alive and humming with possibility.

When she showed up the next day with her new security badge, he didn’t know whether to be grateful or nervous, hopeful or alarmed. One thing he wasn’t was surprised.

Leslie Knope was definitely essential—to what or to whom, he wasn’t ready to say.


End file.
